European Inventor of the Year conference and gala
Website
http://www.european-inventor.org/
Date
03, 04 May 2006
Location
Brussels, Autoworld, Parc du Cinquentenaire
Nominations
MP3
Karlheinz Brandenburg invented the MP3 format and revolutionised the world of music while he was a postgraduate student at the University of Erlangen in southern Germany. After his professor was told by a patent examiner in Munich that music could not be fed down a phone line, the student went about proving that it could. Today, thanks to the Internet, MP3 is the international standard for audio-coding. More than 200 million people have installed a software player on their computers and sales of MP3 players topped 50 million last year. Karlheinz Brandenburg is now the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau and the holder of 25 patents, with several more pending.
Turbocodes
Two French engineers, Professors Claude Berroux and the late Alain Glavieux, solved a data communications problem that had puzzled researchers for decades when they announced the development of Turbo Codes in 1993. This coding method allows data to be transferred with almost perfect reliability at a rate close to the theoretical maximum. Information in the form of video, voice or data is susceptible to changes when broadcast over long distances and the Turbo Codes provided a revolutionary method of correcting these errors. The inventors from the French School of Telecommunications in Brest developed the codes as part of a research agreement with France Telecom. The technology is used in more than 500 million mobile phones and Turbo Codes are now used to transmit data from space probes, like the ESA's SMART-1.
Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers
The invention of Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers (EDFAs) by three researchers, Joan Eleanor Tarbox, Laurance Paul Scrivener and Giorgio Grasso, at the Pirelli Laboratories in Milan, Italy has transformed the way we communicate today. The optical amplifier boosts the strength of signals in optical fibres, which send data using pulses of light. Prior to this invention, amplifiers for optical fibres had to swap the data from an optical to an electrical signal and back again, but the EDFA technology allows an optical pulse to travel hundreds of kilometres. This discovery considerably reduced the cost and complexity of trans-oceanic communication, paving the way for the Internet as we know it today.
Smart cards
François Geronimi's invention - a method of managing an application program stored in an IC card - has made smart cards more secure by allowing them to be updated remotely. The idea, which has applications from pay TV to government business, came to him while he was working at French smart card manufacturer Gemplus in the early 1990s. To date, the company, which has since promoted Geronimi to Research and Development Service Centre Director, has sold more than 5.5 billion smart cards using his technology. Gemplus' products are used in SIM cards in mobile phones, bank cards, travel tickets and ID cards.
